Senior Product Manager

Packback’s mission is to empower every student to be fearlessly curious and find their unique voice.

These few words shape everything we do at Packback from the smallest decision to the largest. Over the last decade since our company’s founding, our team has seen first-hand the power of giving students intentionally designed spaces in their learning experience to be autonomous and curious. We have also seen the incredible benefits of using AI technology to shorten feedback loops and help students revise their work before they submit.

Packback is a pedagogy partner that uses technology as a “means to an end” to shorten feedback loops for students and instructors, improve writing and critical thinking skills, and cultivate student-centered, trust-based educational learning environments.

About the Role

Packback sits at the intersection of AI and education, and we are hiring a Senior Product Manager to help decide what we build next. You will lead discovery and delivery across several product opportunities at once and bring AI-assisted prototyping and disciplined experimentation into how our product team works.

AI has made building fast. The harder question is whether we are building the right thing. You will help us test ideas quickly, read results honestly, and change course when users tell us something is not working.

You will join a small, empowered product and design team who work side by side with engineers to shape problems and own solutions together. You will have real ownership of what gets built, from first prototype to user adoption. Current work spans AI-integrated assignments, writing, discussions, and data insights, where real instructor and student feedback shapes what we build. Everything we ship exists to help students think critically, write with purpose, and learn more deeply.

What you will do

Discovery and delivery

• Lead discovery and delivery for multiple opportunities at once, from early research through release and user adoption
• Shape what we work on next: bring a clear business case for where time should go, and prioritize and de-prioritize to keep projects on track. 
• Define the problem, success criteria and constraints clearly, then sequence work into releasable phases, and plan releases and timelines 

User and market research

• Talk with instructors and students regularly, and tell real demand from polite interest
• Track customer and market shifts, including competitors, and bring concise cases for adding or changing roadmap projects

AI prototyping and evaluation

• Build working prototypes with AI tools to test ideas before committing engineering time
• Evaluate our AI features: spot output that is inconsistent, generic, or wrong for the learning context, and explain how to fix it

Experimentation and outcomes

• Design experiments with a clear hypothesis, success and stop criteria agreed before work starts, and a plan for how you will read the results.
• Define outcome metrics up front, and check impact after release
• Share what works so the whole team gets better at testing ideas and measuring results

Collaboration

• Own what we build and why, and work with engineers who own more of the final call on how. 
• Align stakeholders across engineering, design, and the business around product goals, and make sure everyone working on a project understands the "why"
• Partner with sales, customer success, and marketing so they can tell a compelling story about what we ship, and track adoption after launch

What success looks like

• You continually explore and shape new opportunities with real input from users and signals from the market, so we decide what to build next based on current evidence
• You ship small, finished slices of work that bring users value, on a predictable timeline
• You can measure and report on how our work influenced user behavior and business outcomes
• Every project ends with an honest readout, including when the evidence says to stop or change course
• Sales, customer success, and marketing are ready to tell a compelling story about what you ship
• You help teammates adopt prototyping and experimentation habits

Requirements

Required Experience

• 4+ years of product management at a SaaS company
• A track record of taking features or significant enhancements from research to user adoption, with evidence that you planned for adoption and did not stop at launch
• Experience in higher education or education more broadly (EdTech, institutions, or instruction), and an understanding of what motivates students to do the work

User and market research

• User research skills: you have run interviews or built surveys, and you can tell real demand from polite interest

AI prototyping and evaluation

• Hands-on AI prototyping experience. You can walk us through a prototype you built with AI tools: the problem you were solving, what you learned from it, and what you did with the result. 
• AI literacy and judgment: you can spot weak AI behavior, explain the gap, and propose an effective fix

Experimentation and outcomes

• Experience designing and running experiments, and enough statistical fluency to know when a result is real 
• Data fluency: comfortable with SQL or BigQuery-style analysis, or AI-assisted analysis, to read results yourself
• Intellectual honesty: you stay attached to outcomes, not to your original idea. You end projects the evidence does not support and report negative results fully.

Technical acumen and tools

• Technical acumen: you understand how software is built and shipped, ask engineers good questions, and stay curious about how our systems and data work
• Experience with an issue tracker (Jira, Linear, or Azure DevOps) and an AI assistant (Claude or similar). We use Jira and Claude, and we will teach you our tools.

Collaboration

• Clear written and verbal communication, and a collaborative approach with engineers and designers

Nice to haves

• Direct EdTech experience
• Experience building, tuning, or evaluating a shipped AI-powered feature, including ongoing evaluation
• An understanding of how institutional buying differs from instructor adoption

Additional Information:

Sponsorship: Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S without the need for sponsorship. Packback does not offer visa sponsorship for this role.

Location: Currently we are only able to hire from these states: AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, HI, IA, IL, IN, KY, MA, MD, MI, NJ, NC, NY, OH, PA, RI, SC, TX, VA, WA, WI

Salary: $130,000-$150,000 annually, with an annual bonus target of 15%

Benefits

Why work at Packback?

Build a meaningful career while building the future of education as a part of a company culture that fosters the growth, safety, and creativity of its employees.

Intentional Culture

Packback knows that the single most important part of any company is its people. We take building and maintaining a conscious and intentional culture of open communication, curiosity, and leadership extremely seriously. We collectively commit to make Packback a safe environment where people can focus on doing great work instead of dealing with drama.

Career Development

Packback’s career development paths present a unique balance between clarity and guidance around defined paths, and room for our team to create their own path. Each team has its own career development tracks with support and training, and still allow for customization of these paths to create a role where a team member’s full passions and abilities are put to use!

Thoughtful Benefits

• 12 weeks of paid leave for welcoming new children
• Multiple Health and Welfare Benefit Options (Medical, Dental, Vision)
• 401k plan (with employer matching)
• Flexible + Remote Work Opportunities
• Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO)
• Employer Assistance Program (EAP)
• Calm and DoorDash subscriptions